The Strangers: Chapter 1 movie review: A rather indistinct reboot

The Strangers: Chapter 1 movie review

Film: The Strangers: Chapter 1
Cast: Madelaine Petsch, Ryan Bown, Matus Lajcak, Rachel Shenton, Megan Suri, Gabriel Basso
Director: Renny Harlin
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 91 min

A reboot of Bryan Bertino's Liv Tyler starrer ‘The Strangers,' a 2008 cult hit home invasion horror movie with vicious strangers dressed like a scarecrow and enraged Betty Boops, this Chapter 1, is the first part of an intended 3 part franchise.

The opening sequence has a man being followed and hacked down by three masked men. Thereafter, the narrative follows a young couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) who are traveling across the country. They find out their GPS is malfunctioning, take a wrong turn, and promptly get stranded in an off-the-beaten-path small-town. In this film it's Venus, Oregon, the residents seem unduly hostile and the couple feels upended by the cold reception they get there.

When they stop at a diner to get a meal, they meet some of the locals, including a Sheriff (Richard Brake), the waitress at the diner, creepy mechanics who appear to have fiddled with their car, and highly conservative townsfolk who frown at them for not being married after 5 years of dating. Their car won't start and they are told that the replacement for the part will take a day. Maya and Ryan are then pointed to an AirBnB on the edge of town. Once settled in the AirBnB things begin to get murkier. Cell service is shaky and shadowy figures lurk in the woods. Thereafter, panic takes centre-stage as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive.

This first issue of Harlin's new trilogy brings back masked assailants and brutal violence but there's no originality to cling to. The helming is pretty indolent for a horror/thriller. After the opening shocker, the narrative gets lazy and the build-up is rather half-baked. Everything feels familiar. The problem is that we neither get to know much about the lead couple nor their assailants. So there's no attachment here at all. The writers Bryan Bertino, Alan R. Cohen, and Alan Freedland fail to make the set-up convincing or believable. Right from the beginning we are given to realise that the couple are irresponsible and the people they encounter don't like them. The choices made by the couple when their lives are in danger also seem ludicrous. So for the audience, there's no chance of an empathy build-up. It's hard to care for someone we don't get to know upfront.

There's not much subtlety and way too many cliches in this telling. Dramatic music, predictable scares, forests shrouded in fog, a few jump scares and meaningless dialogue in a clunky script fail to make the scares count.

The premise is a trope in itself - city kids in a redneck town full of leery, sinister Oregonian backwoods locals who speak in southern accents. Several seemingly important plot points have nowhere to go. We are made to understand that Ryan needs his inhaler whenever he gets agitated but there appears to be no such need once the harassment begins. The storyline, plot, and set-up feel contrived and believability becomes suspect. This is a soulless paint-by-numbers imitation of the source material with a lot of unnecessary elements that come up at odd moments to derail the tension and tempo. There's not much of a storyline, the actors fail to make it count and the lame ending tells you that the creators were more interested in expanding the universe than in making this one segment count. On its own the film may be a passably benign horror but as a homage to the original..? It just doesn't work!